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No, tags should not add more implicit requirements to questions/answers We already have problems with explaining to people that hard-science is different from every other tag that exists on the main site because suddenly answers are required to cite their sources and provide calculations and such, while the question has to suddenly adhere to the same ...

This is one of those areas where a topic breaks the model a bit. For questions, we have essentially two axes for voting: Closing a question - possible even if highly upvoted - makes it eligible for deletion and prevents answers from being posted, providing strong encouragement for improvement. For answers though, there's only one axis: useful / useless. ...

No, suggestion of answer is not a valid comment. If you hover the mouse over the "add a comment" you will see the following help text Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. Avoid answering in comments. Other communities are more strict in following this policy, here I (too) often see that users still draft answers in ...

In general It's . . . a judgement call - and that's coming from someone who probably makes some poor judgement calls in this area from time to time. If you're going to write an answer that you think is pretty in-depth and goes above and beyond the call of duty, ask yourself this: Is it necessary to go the extra mile? Will I be raising readers to a new plane ...

One of the problems which I think new users using the tag face is that they don't necessarily know much about it. Stack Exchange can be a bit complicated to understand when you first join, and a tag which requires enforcement like the hard-science tag does just adds another layer of complexity. This may have been what happened with What would/should humanity ...

I think there's a balance needed here - how many other good answers are there? If a question has 10 decent answers, a comment with half an answer probably doesn't add anything. If a question has no answers, has had no answers for a while, and I can contribute some information - but can't answer the question in full or to the minimum standard - putting a ...

I concur with L. Dutch on this: basically, piss or get off the pot. In other words, if you're going to put enough effort into a query such that you're basically answering the query, just write it as an answer! I've seen lots of comments to the comments along the lines of "you should write that as an answer!" I would note, however, that there are ...

In my opinion, it really depends on how much of a comment purist you are. In practise comments tend to be more speech than prose, and as such in their purpose they may straddle the line between different kinds of "acceptable comments". It's not black and white, and they do come in different variants. One kind of "inadequate answer comment"...

There is, in fact, a lot going on in this question. In increasing order of importance (in my mind): There is a good non-hard-science answer (Schwern's). Deleting good answers with good information probably isn't the right solution. Those good non-hard science answers were placed when the hard-science tag was still on the question. The question, while valid ...

Question itself does not adhere to quality I would expect from hard-science. OP asks about "average animal" without explaining what's average for him. Between wasp and monkey differences are enormous. Average mammal? Average animal, overall? What about animals without real brain? Or without limbs? And what about hands/legs/wings differences? OP asks for ...

It is always nice to provide details Math, papers, specific scientific references are always OK. They are not always needed, but are always something nice to have. Problem is not in hard content, but in lack of soft one I mean, really, most of the times answer should contain a section that's easy to understand for someone with high-school level of education. ...

I think that doing more than you need to do cannot hurt. To cite from the hard-science tag: However, do not remove hard-science from a question that has the tag and science-based. Instead remove science-based, because hard-science holds answers to an even higher standard. In my opinion a higher standard is nothing bad and as long as there is a clear ...

I think in a way it's a request to help think of creatively explaining a thing using and maybe even exaggerating what we know in the world. For the example question you had, an answer could be something like 'the bulk/main part of the plant is underground or protected by a thick coating, where it hibernates during the worst of both seasons ready to emerge ...